Openreach Grow FTTP in Northern Ireland to 260K Premises

Openreach’s (BT) commercial roll-out of a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in Northern Ireland has grown its reach to more than 260,000 premises, which has helped the region to push overall “full fibre” coverage to over 35% (here) and they claim that 40% will be achieved by March 2020.

Admittedly Northern Ireland remains a bit of an oddity since they have weaker coverage of fixed “superfast broadband” 24Mbps+ networks (90%) than any other devolved region within the United Kingdom, but on the flip side gigabit-capable “full fibre” networks are available to around 35% of premises – more than all of the UK’s other devolved regions (the UK average is 11%).

The vast majority of that FTTP has only appeared in the past couple of years and it’s largely thanks to Openreach’s (BT) commercial programme. This year alone some 187,000 premises have been included in the region-wide build programme and 120,000 premises come from the Belfast area, where more than 60% of homes and businesses can now take an FTTP service.

Mairead Meyer, Openreach’s Regional Director, said:

“We’re delighted to have reached this important milestone, enabling even more homes and businesses right across NI to take advantage of improved broadband speeds.

We’re building a network that delivers more than just speed. Full fibre broadband will provide Northern Ireland with a future-proof and consistent service that will help renew towns and communities across the region and supports its position as a leading digital economy.”

We should add that cable operator Virgin Media has also added a bit of FTTP (sadly they haven’t said exactly how much) and new alternative network providers, such as Fibrus, have got big on-going build plans of their own (here). Exactly how much FTTP overbuild there is between these three players is unclear but they all tend to focus most of their efforts on similar urban areas.

Going forward it’s anticipated that the long-in-gestation £165m Project Stratum scheme, which aspires to tackle most of the 97,000 premises that are currently eligible to be upgraded with a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) network (here), could help to further extend the reach of FTTP.